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Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

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Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#851

Post by bluedino »

ianhowson wrote: post #561
vessenes wrote: post #305

Commenters here seem dubious. I’ll take the contra-position. This feels to me like it’s going to be great; a big win for consumers and developers. Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from any other manufacturer. I presume their consumer hardware will launch with an A13Z, or maybe an A14 type chip. Apple has consistently shipped new chip designs on time; I…

> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. I'm predicting the opposite: you won't actually see any difference. Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you'll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gain…

CPU’s do not mostly run idle, if my CPU usage indicator is accurate.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#852

Post by hn_check »

leonidasv wrote: post #690
vessenes wrote: post #305

Commenters here seem dubious. I’ll take the contra-position. This feels to me like it’s going to be great; a big win for consumers and developers. Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from any other manufacturer. I presume their consumer hardware will launch with an A13Z, or maybe an A14 type chip. Apple has consistently shipped new chip designs on time; I…

Apple chips are fast mostly because they have a lot of cache to spare. Take for example the A12Z. It has 8MB of L2 (not L3, it's L2!) cache. An Intel Core i7-1068NG7 present in the latest Macbook Pros (that performs akin to the A12Z according to Geekbench) has only 2MB of L2 cache. No other ARM CPU has this level of L2 cache. Apple chips are not "magical", Apple just can afford packing up lots and lots of cache becau…

Why do you quote magical as if someone said that.

Further, your point is that Apple chips are faster because of easily replicated reasons. Intel is charging hundreds of dollars for their chip -- you should charge them some consulting fees and tell them how easy this is to boost their performance! This isn't even considering that your whole analysis is flawed to begin with and you're comparing apples and oranges.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#853

Post by JohnBooty »

ianhowson wrote: post #561
vessenes wrote: post #305

Commenters here seem dubious. I’ll take the contra-position. This feels to me like it’s going to be great; a big win for consumers and developers. Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from any other manufacturer. I presume their consumer hardware will launch with an A13Z, or maybe an A14 type chip. Apple has consistently shipped new chip designs on time; I…

> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. I'm predicting the opposite: you won't actually see any difference. Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you'll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gain…

    Apple can start leaning on their specialized ML 
    cores and accelerators
Thank you for mentioning this. I feel like many have missed it.

I think Apple sees this sort of thing as the future, and their true competitive advantage.

Most are focusing on Apple's potential edge over Intel when it comes to general compute performance/watt. Eventually Apple's likely to hit a wall there too though, like Intel.

Where Apple can really pull away is by leaning into custom compute units for specialized tasks. Apple and their full vertical integration will stand alone in the world here. Rather than hoping Intel's chips are good at the things it wants to do, it can specialize the silicone hardcore for the tasks it wants MacOS to do in the future. It will potentially be a throwback to the Amiga days: a system with performance years ahead of competitors because of tight integration with custom hardware.

The questions are:

1. Will anybody notice? The initial ARM Macs may be underwhelming. I'm not sure the initial Mac ARM silicon will necessarily have a lot of special custom Mac-oriented compute goodies. And even if it does, I don't know Mac software will be taking full advantage of it from Day 1. It will take a few product cycles (i.e., years) for this to really bear fruit.

2. Will developers bother to exploit these capabilities as Apple surfaces them? Aside from some flagship content-creation apps, native Mac apps are not exactly flourishing.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#854

Post by StillBored »

danudey wrote: post #749
etqwzutewzu wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also predicting there will be no difference in battery life. If you check technical specifications on past MBP battery specification and battery life you can notice one thing: Watt/hour battery is always decreasing and battery life is always remaining constant (e.g., 10 hours of web scrolling). Gain in power consumption allows to reduce component space which allows further slimmer designs.

Linus Tech Tips recently published a video where they did all kinds of cooling hacks to a Macbook Air, including milling out the CPU heat sink, adding thermal pads to dissipate heat into the chassis (instead of insulating the chassis from the heat), and using a water block to cool the chassis with ice water. They got pretty dramatic results from the first few options, but it topped out at the thermal pads and nothing…

It could just as well have been, choose a pref level and assure it will run for 10 hours...

It actually good engineering to have all the components balanced. If you overbuilt the VRM's for a CPU that would never utilize the current, its just wasted cost.

OTOH, maybe they were downsizing the batteries to keep it at 10H so they could be like "look we extended the battery to 16 hours with our new chips" while also bumping the battery capacity.

We shall see...

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#855

Post by kabacha »

As someone who's not fond of apple ecosystem I'm both excited and afraid. Processing space can definitely use more competition, though I'd be more interested in actual GPU efforts as CPUs are pretty boring unless you're running a server or in a tiny CPU intensive niche.

What scares me though is expanding of walled gardens of apple. Mac used to give back to libre culture at least a little bit and push some valuable standards but with native iPhone apps and this closed architecture I'm afraid it will take away from libre and desktop culture. Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing we'll have to see but I'm staying optimistic.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#857

Post by zanethomas »

ianhowson wrote: post #561
vessenes wrote: post #305

Commenters here seem dubious. I’ll take the contra-position. This feels to me like it’s going to be great; a big win for consumers and developers. Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from any other manufacturer. I presume their consumer hardware will launch with an A13Z, or maybe an A14 type chip. Apple has consistently shipped new chip designs on time; I…

> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. I'm predicting the opposite: you won't actually see any difference. Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you'll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gain…

I'm predicting a future where the os is completely locked down and all software for macs be purchased from the app store. Great revenue model for Apple.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#858

Post by jerkstate »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #642
ianhowson wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. I'm predicting the opposite: you won't actually see any difference. Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you'll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gain…

I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers.

As a S&P500 owner, I am Ok with this.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#859

Post by francoisp »

I think this is exactly the wrong direction. First no more geforce for you. Then the ram is not upgradeable anymore. Oh here goes all ports except a usb3 and you need to carry a full case of dongles. Then the escape key.(It must have escaped the non sense!!!) Then the SSD is soldered. Then this fancy useless color bar and T2. Now you can't run linux with VB or parallels or dual boot to Windoze. They are trying their earnest to drive away the ppl that build their brand by innovating. Where have the days when apple's hardware edge was used to do great features such as target display mode gone? The smartest move apple did was to move to Intel. A MBP was the best windows experience ever, circa 2008. Why can't a 5000$ device have the best processor available that can be used for other oses, plus some ARM silicone? I don't get the part about removing x64; we certainly havent run out of address space.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#860

Post by TimTheTinker »

francoisp wrote: post #859

I think this is exactly the wrong direction. First no more geforce for you. Then the ram is not upgradeable anymore. Oh here goes all ports except a usb3 and you need to carry a full case of dongles. Then the escape key.(It must have escaped the non sense!!!) Then the SSD is soldered. Then this fancy useless color bar and T2. Now you can't run linux with VB or parallels or dual boot to Windoze. They are trying their…

An ARM Mac may very well be able to run the ARM version of Windows 10.
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